Introduction
Email validation is the process of verifying an email address to make sure that it’s valid and ready for sending. Email validation can help your e-commerce business avoid bounces, increase revenue by avoiding lost sales, comply with GDPR regulations and other laws, and more.
Email validation provides a lower bounce rate
If you want to reduce your bounce rate, email validation is a great place to start. The bounce rate is the percentage of emails that go undelivered due to invalid email addresses or missing information. Email validation helps you find out why an email address is invalid and fix it—saving you time, money, and headaches! It can also help identify inactive users so that you know who’s still interested in your content.
E-commerce businesses can increase their revenue with email verification
The most common reason for email verification is to increase revenue from abandoned carts. When a customer adds items to their cart but doesn’t complete the checkout process, that’s an opportunity for you to engage with them and get them back on track towards making a purchase. By sending automated emails that encourage customers in this situation to complete their purchases, you can prevent the loss of future sales (and gain new ones).
Email verification also helps with repeat purchases: when someone who has previously bought from your business returns to purchase again, they may have forgotten or misplaced their old email address—which means they won’t be receiving any order confirmation emails. But if they’ve recently verified their new details via email validation, they’ll continue receiving purchase notifications as usual.
Email validation helps ensure compliance with GDPR
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the world’s most comprehensive data protection law. It requires businesses to obtain consent for any personal data they collect and delete it when it is no longer needed. The GDPR also requires businesses to notify customers of a data breach within 72 hours.
If you don’t validate email addresses, you could accidentally send emails to people who have unsubscribed or never opted in, which would violate all three provisions of the GDPR:
- Consent – You wouldn’t have obtained consent from these people because they didn’t sign up for your email list and therefore aren’t on your list at all!
- Retention – You don’t need their information anymore, so why are you keeping it?
- Notification – How will you know if someone has changed their email address if you don’t validate email addresses before sending an email blast? They won’t be able to receive messages from you anymore if their new address isn’t valid!
Email validation means you comply with CAN-SPAM Act requirements
Email validation is a critical aspect of CAN-SPAM compliance. If you don’t comply with the law, your emails may be blocked, and you could face fines of up to $16,000.
The CAN-SPAM Act requires that your emails include the following:
- A working opt-out link
- A physical address and phone number
- Clear and conspicuous notice of your intent to unsubscribe
Validating email addresses can help e-commerce companies and protect them from legal action
Email validation is a common practice amongst large e-commerce companies, and for a good reason. Not only does it help you avoid bounces and protect you from legal action, get rid of spam comments on your website, and help build a trustworthy brand.
Here’s how email validation can help you:
- Avoid bounces — As we’ve already mentioned, failing to validate an email address could result in a bounce (or two) if the recipient doesn’t know the person trying to reach them. Not only are those false positives more likely to be flagged as spam by recipients, but they’ll also likely land in your inbox with an angry response or complaint that makes their way back up the chain and onto social media — possibly harming perceptions of your company or brand online.
- Avoid legal action — If someone loses money because of something you did wrong (like sending them marketing materials via unvalidated emails), they may try to sue you for damages related to lost profits or other losses incurred during the transaction process (such as when shoppers abandon carts). Validating emails helps ensure that people who sign up can actually receive messages from your company without any hiccups along the way — which means fewer chances for things like lawsuits over bounced payments due to technical issues with delivery methods like SMS texts or push notifications sent through third-party platforms like Messenger Lite
Conclusion
Email validation is an important part of the e-commerce process. It helps ensure that your customers are receiving the information they need from you in a timely manner, and it also helps you avoid legal action by ensuring compliance with various regulations like GDPR and CAN-SPAM Act requirements. Email validation can be done quickly and easily using one of our tools or by using a third-party service provider such as “The Email Laundry” (www.theemaillaundry.com).